January 2018 Pediatrics

For January 2018, we reviewed 34 journals and identified 132 articles as potentially relevant to Pediatric and School-Based SLPs. We then narrowed it down to what's covered here. For more on how we do this, see here.

We’ve previously pointed you to research supporting “Percent Grammatical Utterances” (that’s PGU for the acronym-inclined) as a good language sample analysis to help diagnose developmental language disorder (DLD). While great practice, the procedure for computing PGU can be, in reality, pretty time-consuming. In this study, the researchers that brought us PGU have given us a faster way to accomplish pretty much the same thing...

We know that difficulty with verb tense marking in can be a good indicator of developmental language disorder (DLD). Errors in spontaneous speech can point to DLD in kids up through 1st grade; for older kids (10–12), you can look at their writing. But what about those middle grades? The authors of this study looked to past tense marking in oral reading...

Assessing bilingual children’s vocabulary skills is challenging because they may know different words across their languages. One method to address this problem is conceptual scoring of vocab tests, in which the child gets credit for knowing the word in at least one language. For example, if the child misses the English word shoe but recalls the Spanish word zapato, he gets the point for that item. One way to go about getting conceptual scores is to test the child in one language and switch to another to prompt any words the child doesn’t know. However, the child’s ability to switch between languages...

If you work in a school that uses a response to intervention (RtI) framework, you can probably relate to the balancing act associated with screening: you want to use tools that accurately identify students needing additional assessment, but that also make good use of your time and are relatively easy to administer. What if you could screen a whole class at the same time?...

Think about the last time you assessed a young child’s speech— did you look at polysyllables (i.e., words with three or more syllables)? There are often only a small number of polysyllable targets on speech-sampling assessments, which is problematic because polysyllable production is related to both phonological processingand later literacy development. In this article, Masso and colleagues provide tools for analyzing longer words...